Local Chapter Team Guide - Cooperate for Canada

This guide details each of the key tasks of the local Riding Teams, and step-by-step instructions for how to complete them. If you have questions after reading this toolkit, contact us for support. Please put “Questions from Local Chapter” in your subject heading.

Form a local chapter (contact us about your interest), we will connect with the members in your riding or region – for those forming larger clusters – to see if we can make their names available to you as part of the chapter.
Decide on a leader and team responsibilities (you can grow as you go, but the first steps are
- selecting a leader who acts as liaison with C4C national team;
- selecting who will interview candidates to determine the ‘unity candidate’; c. selecting volunteers to do outreach in your community
  - door knocking to grow your membership of your chapter
  - driving support (volunteer time and $) towards the unity candidate once they have been chosen
- selecting the members who will keep in touch with the chosen candidate to keep them appraised of local issues.

We ask that the determination of the unity candidate take place in the early stages of your chapter work – in order to help drive volunteer support and donations to that candidate.

Overview

The heart of the action of Cooperate for Canada comes down to uniting voters – and to do that, we need people on the ground, in our target ridings, getting people plugged in and connected. And that’s where the absolutely essential Chapter teams come in.

Our Chapter teams will undertake the key tasks listed below to interview candidates, inform our assessments of which candidates to unite behind, and organize voters in these key ridings to unite and vote together.

At least one member of your local chapter should be designated as contact and liaison with the national team.

If you want to become part of a local chapter, simply sign up on our website under any action (eg voting pledges) and you will be part of our member database. We can connect you with chapter leaders.

If you want to be a chapter leader, please contact us to let us know. In the subject heading put “Becoming a Chapter Leader” in the subject heading – if there are others in your riding who want to help by leading we can connect you.

Your role is critical in providing feedback on nationally conceived strategies, requests for support tailored specifically to your riding, a way for us to build connections across the province or across the nation with other ridings facing similar challenges and exchanging ideas.

Wherever possible (based on membership on the ground) we will prioritize ridings where the threat of a PC or CPC victory due to vote splitting is highest, and the possibility of beating them through cooperation is best, based on our available data, and will be focusing our efforts there. Nonetheless, we do not want to be caught unprepared if things change, and as a result, we are aiming to at least have a meeting with the centre/left candidates in all of the key ridings.

Our Strategy

Identify the best positioned candidate to defeat the Conservative candidate in each riding
Secure commitments from non-Conservative candidates to work across party lines to deny Conservatives a government if we can hold them below the majority threshold.
Organize people around the idea of uniting behind that candidate through our Voting Pledge – a commitment to vote together for the candidate best positioned to win in that riding.
Finally, once polls open, turn out our pledged voters – and as many more voters as possible – to vote for our unity candidate in each riding.

To advance that strategy, we’ve assembled this guide, which will instruct you step-by-step on the various tasks needed to achieve it.

These tasks include:

Meeting with non Conservative candidates
Connecting with voters on the ground in your riding and collecting voting pledges

Detailed instructions are below.

Chapter team leads: Each chapter team should appoint at least one person to be a “lead”. The lead must be in our Action Network member database. The team lead’s role is to stay connected to the rest of the campaign in that channel, to ensure they always have the latest information and instructions, and so they can request support from the rest of the campaign team.

You may choose to organize your local riding volunteers however you find most suitable; some people prefer to maintain an email list, others prefer to use our Action Network member list, and others may prefer to create a Facebook or Bluesky group for their riding. We will equip riding teams with the emails of people in their riding who sign up to get involved (with their permission).

Candidate Interviews

Candidate interviews are essential to our model – they are a big part of what informs our selection process to choose the candidates best equipped to defeat the Conservatives. Below is a step-by-step guide to running your candidate interviews. Not every team member in a riding needs to attend the meeting, and moving quickly is important, but at least two is optimal if you have two people available.

Identify the NDP, Liberal, and Green candidates in your riding. Make note of their contact information.
Use 338canada.ca polling analysis to get a rough assessment of which candidate from NDP, Liberal, and Greens is most likely to beat the conservatives. (Please refer to our Polling Analysis Guide ). Note: this is the starting point, it is not the final deciding point. Your “on-the-ground” research – about the local candidates and their history, about who is an incumbent, is critical in determining who is the best candidate.
Reach out to the candidate or their campaign, identify yourself as a Cooperate for Canada volunteer and ask to set up a meeting with the candidate to help inform the selection of a unity candidate in the riding. Do your best to answer their questions if they have any. You can book meetings in person if you feel comfortable with it, or you can do them over Zoom – if you need help setting up Zoom, ask your team lead to request support (you can also Contact us)
For those candidates who are less likely to win (according to polling analysis) you might ask them this question: “The polls we consulted show you have less support than [Name the leading progressive candidate] in this riding . Can you make a case for us as to why you think you will win?”
For the candidate who is in the lead ahead of the other two parties, a longer interview will be very helpful. (see questions below)
Once you have a date and time locked for a meeting with the candidate, contact us via SLACK enter so organizers know an interview is booked:
When the meeting comes, work through the loose script below. Plan to take notes to record their answers, we will send you a google doc form (pending) you can use to enter the answers .
Introduce yourself, and share a little bit about Cooperate for Canada and why you are volunteering with us. (We can help you with talking points if you need them).
Ask them to share a bit about why they’re running (ask them to limit their answer to 3 minutes)
Explain our operation: building an online network to deliver our message urging cooperation, and building a grassroots movement in each riding to unite behind the candidate best positioned to deny a Conservative win in this riding, with an aim of keeping the Conservatives locked out of as many ridings as possible. We call these candidates our “Unity Candidates”.
Explain the factors we are assessing for selecting our unity candidates.
- Candidate resume, connection to riding, other strengths eg incumbency and community involvement
- Campaign strength and capacity – fundraising, data, volunteers, etc
- Past 3 election outcomes
- Polling aggregates, weighted for local polling, including that conducted by our team
- Strength of our unity pledge numbers – unity pledges are voters we’ve signed up in the riding who commit to vote with us for our unity candidate.
Let them know you’re going to ask them a few questions but see if they have any questions first for you. Do your best to answer, but if you don’t know an answer, refer them to our website and let them know we are happy to answer questions if they contact us. Then, ask them our questions.
- You can lead off by saying:
  - “To operate our model, we are going to ask you some hard questions about your ability to defeat the local PC candidate. We know that some of this information is stuff you may not want to share, and that’s ok – what you choose to share is up to you. The more you share with us, the better able we are to assess your ability to defeat the PC and the more confident we can be in our choice if we decide to select you as our unity candidate in this riding and send our voters your way.”

Questions for Candidates

How long have you lived in the riding?
Tell us a bit about your connection to the community here.
What do you feel are the top issues in your riding?
Have you run before and if so, how many times?
Have you won previous elections in this riding, for any role?
Have you held leadership roles in the community in other areas?
What other experience – career, hobby, or otherwise should we consider in this assessment?
Would you like to share anything about your fundraising here that you think we should know?
If you’re willing to share, how many regularly active volunteers are currently part of your campaign?
If you’re willing to share, how many marks do you currently have in your database? [Note: “marks” means the number of voters they’ve talked to & gathered information about their voter intentions. If they give you more info than just a number, record the extra info in the “anything else” field]
What other strengths or assets do you think we should consider as we make our decision? Or is there anything else you want to add?
Please make the case as to why you think you will win.

Finally, we need to secure a commitment that if they are elected AND we hold Conservatives to a minority, they will work across party lines to form a government and keep Conservatives out.

You can use this script:

“Current polling has Conservatives on a path to form government with a majority. This campaign is structured to deny them those seats and ensure that they remain below the majority threshold. Assume we are successful, such that their party has the most seats but not enough to form a majority. In that case, if you are elected, will you commit to working across party lines to form a minority government and deny Conservatives a second term?”

Conclude by thanking them for their time and let them know we’ll be making our decision before advanced polls open, and that we will be in touch with them either way before we take our decision public.

Once the meeting is over, and as quickly as possible afterwards, report back to us via SLACK and the google doc.

Connecting with Voters

Connecting with voters directly is a critical part of our campaign effort. The cornerstone of our direct voter contact effort is our Voting Pledge drive – asking people to commit to vote for our unity candidate in their riding. Every voter that signs our pledge is one more vote to lock in behind our unity candidate and brings us that much closer to defeating the Conservatives.

The bulk of your team’s efforts, once the candidate interviews are complete, will be connecting with voters directly in the community to collect those pledges.

Ultimately, it’s up to your riding team to decide what kinds of activities you want to undertake. But we have provided a step-by-step guide to a number of different useful voter contact tactics that you can choose from, including both online and in-person techniques.

Collecting Voting Pledges

Our Voting Pledges are meant to unite voters behind our chosen unity candidate. When voters sign the pledge, they agree to vote for the Unity Candidate, and they share their email address with us so we can notify them once the selections are made. We have made it easy to collect Voting Pledges in numerous ways. The pledge also allows them to indicate if they’d like to get involved – we will connect volunteer signups in your area to your team.

Below, we’ve put together instructions for a number of tactics to help you collect Voting Pledges in your riding. The more Pledges you gather, the more likely we are to achieve our goal in your riding. The pledge form can be accessed here: cooperateforcanada.ca/voting-pledges/

Don’t hesitate to ask for support; your team lead can always reach us by contacting our outreach team with questions, requests and feedback. Please contact us and put “Questions for collecting Voting Pledges” in your subject heading. Your local team efforts are the cornerstone of this campaign – in many ways, the entire operation is built to help support your work, so please ask if you need any help or support of any kind!

Pledge Collection Tactics

Below is an overview of some tested tactics that can be used to help reach voters in your riding and secure more unity pledges. While we have put the outlines of these tactics here for now, our organizing team will be adding more support resources and information to this section of the guide in the days to come.

In addition, if you have other tactics, you’d like to try just let us know your ideas – so organizers can ensure that our systems will work with your idea – and then go ahead and give it a try!

Canvassing (In Person)

Simply going door to door to talk to your neighbours is a proven tactic for connecting with voters in your riding. Candidates are doing it daily for a reason! We will be adding resources to this kit to support canvassing efforts, including a script, and QR code (allowing people to quickly sign the pledge on their smartphone), and files you can print out if you prefer. Stay tuned!

In this toolkit we are including a handout on how to join various media platforms, how to amplify our message within them, and if necessary how to protect yourself from data scraping.

Online

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/ is fast outpacing X/twitter as a safe social media platform and our follower numbers are growing rapidly. Our Bluesky account has the fastest growing following. If you have a Bluesky account we encourage you to follow us and like, share and comment on our posts.
Facebook: Over 80% of Canadians are on Facebook, it is the preferred platform for the older generation, and many anti-conservative groups have a strong presence there. If you have a Facebook account please ‘like’ our page and share our posts to amplify our message.
Cooperate for Canada website: Encourage all the members in your riding to sign up – that way they will be automatically connected (via Action Network) to our latest news and resources. We manage our membership list using Action Network, which can sorts people by ridings – we will keep you updated as that list grows
Instagram: We are new to Instagram, but it is the preferred site of younger generations – who are a particular target of the Conservative party – and also many extremely popular anti-conservatives voices among those generations. We are working on developing content. Keep an eye on our account.

Tabling at Events

Booking a table at local community events, festivals, and fairs is a great way to get visibility and to sign up pledges. We will be providing a kit for successful tabling, including signup sheets and more.

Contacting family and friends – in person, by phone, text or email
Contacting your social networks through organizations is even better – are you a member of Parent Council? A book club? A local running team? A climate group? Sharing about our campaign through organizations and asking them to advertise to their membership is one of the fastest ways to build support
Don’t forget your social networks outside of your riding! We are a national campaign and building support from coast to coast to coast is key.

Attend campaign events

There are often all-candidate meetings, debates, town halls, and other campaign events occurring throughout the election. These are the kinds of events that other politically interested people attend and therefore make a great place to bring up the Cooperate for Canada campaign. You can try to ask questions of the candidates, and you can chat with people outside an event (if they are in person) or in the chat box (if they are online) about the campaign. We will be providing some sample questions and ideas for this in the days to come.

Postering

Get creative, design, print and put up posters!

Host events

A great way to connect with people is to host an event. We will be including an event planning guide here in the days to come. In the meantime, a few ideas for events you could host include:
- A town hall for the non-Conservative candidates
- An outdoor block party to gather your neighbours and chat (weather permitting!)
- A “Friend finder” event to bring people together to talk about the
- Canvass and then invite each to reach out to their friends and neighbours in the riding.
We will be creating some event guides, and we also can offer support if you need it (for example, we can equip you with a Zoom link if you want to host an event online)

Local media

Almost every riding has at least a one or two local media outlets. These outlets are constantly looking for good stories; a press release to them can be a great way to get visibility and they may even include the QR code for Voting Pledges! We will be including sample press releases in the days to come. We are also including a guide to writing op eds

I’m in a Historically “Safe” Riding – How can I help?

First, check polling analysis from 338canada.ca – if the loss to Conservatives in Toronto-St. Paul riding taught us anything it is that no riding is safe from vote splitting.
Second, if you are absolutely certain your riding is “safe” organize your members to volunteer in other ridings that need your support. Contact us through Put “Outreach” in the subject heading, and we will connect you and others in your riding to other local ridings where you can be active. Making donations and giving your time in another riding can help make a huge difference for a Unity candidate
Or invite your members, depending on their skill set, to join one of our national teams (Research, Outreach, Communications, Volunteer Recruiting)

Please Note: At this time we ask that you do not share the information on this page. Thank you. – Cooperate for Canada Team